Boise Journal; Survival Duty in 'Raptor Capital of the World'

By KEITH SCHNEIDER, Special to the New York Times

Published: May 24, 1988

BOISE, Idaho, May 18—
Day-old peregrine falcon chicks, hardly acting or eating like birds, gulp down chunks of fresh quail offered at the end of a tweezer.

Ravenous, 21-day-old Mauritius kestrels, an endangered falcon from an island in the Indian Ocean, chirp relentlessly, pausing only long enough to swallow or sleep.

On the summit of a grass-cloaked butte just south of Idaho's capital, the sounds of insistent hunger, squeaky as a diner's twirling stool, have returned to the World Center for Birds of Prey.

Since late April, when the hatching season began, breeders of rare eagles and falcons have been as busy as new mothers.

By July more than 200 peregrine chicks and several from other endangered species will be hatched and nursed to young adulthood, the first vital steps in a captive breeding program that is considered one of the most successful in the field of wildlife restoration.

''It seems like a lot of work now,'' said Calvin Sandfort, a 33-year-old breeder who has reared more than 600 peregrine falcons since 1984. ''But when the season ends I feel like I've added something special to the world.''

That such a program is now based in Idaho, where sheep and cattle ranchers of old poisoned eagles and shot hawks and falcons, shows how far the West and the nation have come in reconsidering the value of animals once despised as predators or pests.

It is fair, in fact, to say that Idaho has gone a little falcon-crazy. Boise has begun to call itself ''the raptor capital of the world.'' ''Raptor'' is the term used to refer to flesh-eating birds.

And today was the start of the third Idaho Birds of Prey Festival, a five-day event that includes a 10-kilometer ''Wings to Wings'' race, a wildlife film festival, and a concert, ''Through the Eyes of an Eagle.''

The festival owes its existence to two outposts of safety for raptors. The first is a breathtaking, 482,000-acre preserve established by the Interior Department in 1980 along the Snake River, south of Boise. The area supports the highest density of hawks, falcons and eagles in the world.

The second is the World Center for Birds of Prey, established in 1984 by the Peregrine Fund, a group that began releasing falcons from its headquarters at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1974 and is largely responsible for rebuilding populations of the nearly extinct peregrine in the East.

The Peregrine Fund's directors, including its founder, Tom J. Cade, a Cornell ornithologist, sought to duplicate the feat in the West, where peregrines have been destroyed by the same visible and invisible scars of industrialization, principally agricultural pesticides.

The World Center's restoration program, paid for with just over $1 million in donations each year, is a combination of high-technology biology, modern poultry farming and ancient falconry. From his brooder laboratory, Mr. Sandfort monitors 50 pairs of adult peregrines housed in chambers that are equipped with television cameras and sensitive microphones.

Among the more delicate and dangerous aspects of Mr. Sandfort's work is removing eggs from peregrine nests and banding chicks that are returned to adults after they are a 7 to 10 days old. This week Mr. Sandfort bore a nasty slash on his right eyelid, from a peregrine's talon.

When he's not warding off the fearless falcons, Mr. Sandfort is generally busy with less treacherous tools that have increased the production of peregrines and dramatically lowered mortality. Females that do not cooperate with their mates are artificially inseminated. Advanced nutrition studies, including chemical analysis of the quail, rabbit, and mice fed to the birds, have improved raptor meals and made chicks sturdier. Standard incubators have been redesigned to warm fragile eggs.

Fewer than two of every 100 chicks that hatch in his brood laboratory die, said Mr. Sandfort. At the current rate of production, about 160 chicks a year, the peregrine population in the West could be restored by the end of the century, he said.

The center's director, Bill Burnham, 40, is hopeful the same reproductive techniques will prove to be just as successful with other rare birds of prey. Teams of experts have been dispatched to Central America, Africa and Asia to study raptors whose habitats are disappearing at a rate that threatens their survival.

Pairs of Mauritius kestrels, giant harpy eagles from South America and endangered Teita falcons from southern Africa, are now housed at the center where breeders are trying to coax restless adults to have babies.